A flight meta-search engine with metamorph

We demonstrate a flight meta-search engine that is based on the Metamorph framework. Metamorph provides mechanisms to model web forms together with the interactions which are needed to fulfil a request, and can generate interaction sequences that pose queries using these web forms and collect the results. In this paper, we discuss an interesting new feature that makes use of the forms themselves as an information source. We show how data can be extracted from web forms (rather than the data behind web forms) to generate a graph of flight connections between cities. The flight connection graph allows us to vastly reduce the number of queries that the engine sends to airline websites in the most interesting search scenarios; those that involve the controversial practice of creative ticketing, in which agencies attempt to find lower price fares by using more than one airline for a journey. We describe a system which attains data from a number of websites to identify promising routes and ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Bernhard Krüpl, Wolfgang Holzinger, Yansen Darmaputra, Robert Baumgartner
• Keywords: Flight Connection Graph, Flight Meta-search Engine, Internet Technology, Web Forms, WWW 2009